Society

The Young Reporter is proud to announce that it was scheduled to win two Human Rights Press Awards this year before the Foreign Correspondents’ Club cancelled the awards on Monday, just days before the winners were to be announced.  Former TYR reporters and editors Sara Cheng, Simran Vaswani and Kylan Goh were to win both first and second place in the university student category, according to the award list leaked to Hong Kong Free Press. The TYR story Running District Councils in absence of colleagues arrested under NSL: work and a doubtful fate, reported by Cheng and edited by Goh, was to be the winner in the student category. The TYR article reported the difficulties faced by district councillors after colleagues were arrested under the National Security Law. “The reporter’s rigour and resolve in tackling a sensitive topic in a city with diminishing press freedoms, where so few people are actually willing to speak on these issues in the wake of the National Security Law (NSL),” said the judges’ comments. The other winner in this category was scheduled to be a report by U-Beat Magazine, published by journalism students at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Another TYR story, ‘It’s either them or us’: desperate protestors take to Myanmar streets as junta uses arrests, violence to keep power, reported by Cheng and edited by Vaswani, was scheduled to win a merit prize. The judges’ comments said the report “stood out for quality and comprehensive reporting”. The documentary Pledging Allegiance reported by San Po Yan Magazine, TYR’s sister publication, the Chinese-language newspaper run by journalism students at Hong Kong Baptist University, was also scheduled to win a merit in the same category, along with reports by U-Beat Magazine and Varsity, also published by journalism students at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.  …

Wong Sze-kai, 30, is a frontline doctor at the Accident and Emergency Department. He feels that some of his patients are "waiting to die". “They were lying on the ground. No meals, no medicine, and no one can help them change their diapers. It’s a living hell,” he said.  As the number of older and critically ill Covid-19 patients continues to mount, Hong Kong’s public hospitals, especially their Accidents and Emergency Departments, are under intense pressure.  Hundreds of  infected elderly people in need of treatment and oxygen had no alternative but to stay in the A&E wards, in corridors, or in lobbies because there was no space in the general wards. “I've heard a few junior nurses cry, not for themselves, but because of the pitiful sight of the patients,” Wong said. As of March 27, nine of the city’s 16 public hospitals reached full occupancy, according to the Hospital Authority’s figures. Wong said the very purpose of creating the Hospital Authority 30 years ago was to tackle the same problems of overloading capacity in hospitals with long waiting times that have been faced year after year. But the problem still exists even before Covid hit the city. Sunny Ho, 22, is a nurse from the Specialist Outpatient Department at Queen Mary Hospital, one of the 10 public hospitals that have been stretched to the limits during the outbreak of the fifth wave of Covid. “The guidelines are constantly changing. The government imposed too many unnecessary preventive measures, adding to the burden on the medical staff. For example, as soon as there was a case, they immediately closed the lift and the overpass and did a lot of contact tracing,” Ho said. “But now the outbreak is a mess. There is not enough manpower and resources to follow the previous …